“Wren Lipinski of Pulaski, Indiana, wins the 2026 prize for best creative fiction. A junior at Our Lady of the Shadows high school, Ms Lipinski was awarded the honor by the Poland Association of Devotional Vocational Aspiration.”

Wren laughs as she reads this aloud to her parents. I thought the association was a VACATIONAL aspirational gig. My ‘sources’ in Poland said luckily for me, a new board member was open to progressive ideas. The board member evidently said: ’This cobweb brained outfit needs some healthy blood, give the prize to the innovative girl from Pulaski.’ !

The Association based in Warsaw is funded by a Polish American named Stanislav Mugor . His great great grandparents emigrated to the US as refugees from the Prussian Partition of Poland in the 1870s. They made their fortune in the meat-packing industry in Indiana. Mr Mugor’s foundation supports Polish American youth.

Wren was invited to bring 3 guests for an all-expenses paid trip to Poland. To be designed by her. This suited her “vAcational” aspirations perfectly. She brought her mom, dad and best friend Gazelle. She structured the itinerary to visit the same places explored by the protagonist in her winning essay Poland: The Smelly Cast Aside Unsung Starfish of the Baltic World, Rises again.

Wren’s great grandmother Janina had been an OB GYN during the “Great Devouring” as some called the Second War.

Her great grandfather Andor Selinger had been a naturalist at the Jewish Institute of Higher Studies in Lutsk. He chaired the department of precious metals, minerals, fossils, and stones of Poland.

Great Grandpapa Andor was a world expert on Polish amber. Since the borders of Poland were permeable, dispensable and relentlessly violated, sometimes the amber he studied was Russian, sometimes Polish, sometimes Scandinavian. Citizens rockhounding amber along the Russian coast could be executed for bringing amber home. Workers in the Russian amber mines were made to empty their pockets at day’s end before being allowed to leave. Pure grade amber was more valuable than gold.

The Orthodox Polish Catholic Church frowned on psychics. When the Third Reich appropriated Poland, it outlawed fortune telling to support the arrest of Romani citizens. Wren’s Great Grandma Janina had to hide her powers of telepathy.

Janina was a miraculous person. She foresaw all the dire events of Poland being absorbed by Nazi Germany with its unquantifiable pestilence of disfigurement and dishumanity. And this being followed by decades of servitude by the life-eviscerating Communistic Soviet Union. Bearing the weight of this foreknowledge, Janina nonetheless was a consistently sunny, healing and steadfast presence.


How can you believe in a God who puts Poland through this, Grammie? Wren’s mother Sylvie used to ask.

Grandma Janina would answer: El Shaddai, our own Heavenly God Almighty and the Holy Mother, and the Black Madonna put us on this sacred Earth to do what Sacred Mom (by mom she meant Mama Earth) does—digest, transform, make lemons into lemonade. Take in thunderstorms, give back crops. Take in eruptions, give back sulfur. Take in barf, give back fertilizer.

Hurrumphhhh! replied Wren’s mother. But beloved Gramma Janina’s sheen rubbed off. And when the time came, Wren concoctrd an itinerary largely based on Janina’s worldview. The four Polish American pilgrims would attend the special fair hosted by the Gypsies, (the Roma) of Poland, to commemorate the little known story of the Nazi attempt to exterminate Gypsies. They would trade songs they wrote in different languages.

They would visit the special tunnel accommodating the stables in the famous Wieliczka Salt Mines near Krakaw. This was where her great great grandfather Jozef had been the farrier. Jozef took care of Lucien, the beloved blind donkey hauled salt and was never taken above ground.

They would stay with their cousin Marek Dabrowski who had inherited the gene for adoration and worship of AMBER. He also bore a current of his great grandmother Janina’s psychic powers. For instance, he contacted the oversoul of Baltic Amber. Marek was interested in the fate of the famous Amber Room. This stunning hall of carved amber had been given to the Russian Czar by a Teutonic prince. One of the wonders of the modern world, it was reassembled in the Hermitage Museum. During the Second War, it was stolen by the Nazis and removed from Russian soil. Several journalists and scholars devoted their careers to finding what happened. But no one ever solved the mystery of how it disappeared. The Amber Oversoul—who was named Golden Rod (Rod for short) —laughed and laughed when asked what had happened to the Amber Room. No, the components of the Amber Room had not sunk in a special ship offshore. No, they had not disappeared in an earthquake beneath the Fuhrer’s 1000 year underground museum (composed of treasures wrenched from the conquered lands of an unhinged empire). No it had not been split up and smuggled into private collections, nor melted down.

Well what then? asked Marek. Rod the Golden was still chuckling.
Through body language, shifts in color and frequency, and poetry, song and lots more laughter, Marek finally gleaned that the Amber Room had outfoxed all its suitors and hunters and villains and heroes. Amber Room—worn out by the machinations of powerful avaricious nation-states—strategized his own demise. He returned to the soil of Grandma Earth. Rod the Golden was silent about where this reunion had taken place. May the vaunted collection of the gems of ‘thousands of suns’ enjoy his rest.

Wren had been yearning to meet Marek for years. They were both part of a telepathic portal called Goldenrod Amber Train. On this train they visited had visited hot springs villages in the Polish countryside; the best places for finding amber washed up on the Baltic coast; areas where people had buried Nazi tanks, turning them into underground bunkers for the next conflagration; and a place where a meteorite had struck the earth and instantly metamorphosed the silica sand into chartreuse celestial-terrestrial glass.

They shared a post (or was it pre?) millennial conviction, perhaps shared by only the two of them, that Poland had a monumental part to play in the creation of a new era on planet Earth. Because Mother Poland had—voluntarily or involuntarily—absorbed so many bones and uncountable torrents of blood of the innocent, her soil was holy. Poland did not need to die for the sins of humanity, she EXiSTED and survived a tempest of the most woeful predations of humanity.

The role of the kidneys in the body said Marek is to house the curriculum, the soul purpose, the destiny. To hold the waters, the emotions, the winter, that which gives and sustains life. Then to merge with the heart which holds the blood, the fire, the summer, in the perfected heart-kidney communion responsible for the realization of purpose.

As goes Poland, so goes the destiny of the world.

This insight was the central wheel around which the spokes of Wren Lipinski’s pilgrimage to modern -day Poland hinged. Moreover, both Marek and Wren agreed that Poland had originally been named OPALANDIA. But over time this had been shortened to POLANDIA, and finally to POLAND. She had been named after the OPALS which like the AMBERS were responsible for the country’s continuous ability to rise from the ashes: to forge new beginnings, to recover after trauma, to give and be given to, to fulfill the promise, protection and direction of the blessed Black Madonna of Częstochowa.

Their pilgrimage went off without a hitch. They posted nothing on social media. They spent hours in silence absorbing he emanations of the stalls for the blind donkey Lucien whom they came to regard as one of their beloved ancestors. They covered their bodies with amber and lay next to hot springs while chanting songs of gratitude for Amber’s service to the entire Earth in Her evolution towards Oneness.

On their wanderings, they took special wooden jars carved by Marek. He called them memory jars. Into these they placed stones who reached out from the Earth of Mother Poland, begging to join their adventure. By the time they returned to Indiana, they had tangible talismans of health, joy, faith and improbable regeneration to share with their community.